Current Initiatives

The Teagle Foundation's grantmaking initiatives aim to strengthen teaching and learning in the arts and sciences and ensure the benefits of a liberal arts education are broadly accessible.

Faculty Planning and Curricular Coherence

At many institutions, the curriculum has grown organically over time, as new courses and majors have been added to provide more choices for students and to accommodate the interests of faculty. The combined demands of quality and cost containment give new urgency to tackling course proliferation and encouraging greater curricular coherence and integration. As institutions seek to sharpen their programs’ goals and expected outcomes, they must do so in the context of limited resources, recognizing that the additive approach is not only financially unsustainable but may ill serve the goals of liberal arts education. This initiative shines the spotlight on the collective efforts that faculty must make to design a coherent and integrated curriculum. The question framing the program is: How can faculty work together to create a more coherent and efficient curriculum whose goals, pathways, and outcomes are clear to students and other constituencies with a stake in the future of higher education?

Liberal Arts and the Professions

A liberal arts education provides the intellectual scaffolding for students to learn “how to learn” in order to be successful in a variety of capacities. However, exposure to the liberal arts in professional programs typically occurs in the form of general education distribution requirements that are not fully integrated into students’ undergraduate experience. This initiative challenges the prevailing mode of professional preparation by asking: How can institutions fully integrate and embed the liberal arts into undergraduate preparation for the professions?

College-Community Connections

The Teagle Foundation has long felt a special responsibility to the community within which it operates and, over the years, has contributed to a wide range of organizations that improve the college-readiness of young people in New York City.

The College-Community Connections (CCC) initiative was developed in 2005 to expand college access services offered through New York City community-based organizations (CBOs) to include partnerships with colleges/universities located in the metropolitan area. The CBOs and institutions have collaborated to introduce high school students from underserved communities to liberal arts education, which cultivates in students higher order capacities that will not only equip them for jobs right out of college but also for the work they will do over the course of a lifetime.

of CCC participants enrolled in college (higher than the national average of 66%)

SPECIAL PROJECTS

The Teagle Foundation occasionally makes special grants for projects that are aligned with our interests in advancing the liberal arts, broadening access to a liberal arts education, and enhancing student learning, and yet do not fall within the parameters of our formal Requests for Proposals.